For the 2nd time we have been asked to make a quote for the design and programing of a website for a professional football team (soccer that is) . Back in 97 I had done something similar and despite that was as a hobby it was pretty complete, that is to say I have some knowledge on what needs to be done.

The funny side of this story is that in both opportunities the people we talked to said that "what we want is based upon Chelsea, Arsenal, Ajax Amsterdam, Manchester United and Liverpool FC websites". And then comes the list of functions they are expecting. We hit a snag when talking about budget. Figures were discussed but they are very low considered to the amount of work involved.

I guess it's hard to find out that information but we were wondering a few things about the top soccer team's website: what is a very rough budget for this sort of website to build and to run ? how many people were involved in the development and are working in the day-to-day activities to keep them updated ?

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jean-luc
www.corobori.com

Design and development for a site with that complexity would be probably more than $50,000 in the US. I have developed sites similar to that where the user interface cost about $30.000 and the backend I did but would have more than doubled the cost. Day to day maintenance is probably done in house, as is content generation. Hosting is probably $100/mo minimum, quadruple that if the the site hosts streaming video and has a decent amount of traffic.

I am not sure how the prices would compare in other countries, but this level of complexity is not cheap. Often the cost is offset through advertising, sponsorships and shared codebase - for example in the US, Major League Baseball provides the web sites for all MLB teams in the US, Canada and Japan. The teams just need to provide the content. The same applies to the National Football League.

If enough of the teams looking for complex sites are from the same league, it might be more cost effective to create a centralized web site for the entire league, with subdomains for each team. This would then distribute the back end costs and would probably make the overall project more affordable.

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The best way to learn anything, is to question everything.